I turned 50 in 2007, so I'm practicing curmudgeon-like behavior by stressing, "whatever it is, I'm agin' it!" Call me anarcho-syndicalist or progressive, except I think most anarchists and progressives are as annoying as neocons. I like to point folks to way-outside-the-mainstream literature and music, while grumbling about everything else.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

I'm attaching the review of Lee Upton's new book of essays on writing, which I just posted to Goodreads. Definitely worth your while.Fans
of Lee Upton's poetry already know she is an ascended master, both feet
firmly anchored to the planet even as she shares visions to make any
bodhisattva jealous. So it's no surprise to see her assembled essays on
the ambitions of the writer be presented as a distilled series of
stories and aphorisms, almost overwhelming in scope. The book has a very
particular focus for a developing writer facing unique challenges, and
thus warrants a high four rather than a perfect five stars, if only for
the eclectic target audience.

This is not a traditional
instruction manual of writing as a craft - no guide to clarity in
presentation, effective character development, parsing and pruning of
lines. Instead, 'Swallowing the Sea' is meant to give writers who have a
decent grasp of their own goals and methods a better understanding of
how to interpret their ambitions, how to deal with dry spells and ennui,
and how to disclose secrets deliberately and effectively.

Don't
be fooled by the apparent brevity of the book. This is the type of
distilled narrative where every word counts (scarcely surprising to find
a virtual prose-poem comprising an essay about genre-hopping). Upton
makes heavy use of other writers' observations, albeit in very
unexpected and startling ways, almost approaching the style of a music
mash-up at times. Those who might be frightened by dense and obscure
references, however, should be delighted by Upton's warmth, humor, and
directness. Just about the time we've had it with kibitzing by Salman
Rushdie or Muriel Spark, we get a simple aw-shucks story of growing up
on a Michigan farm. This book always puts its passionate humanity
first, even if it's adorned with plenty of accessories at times.

The
value of the essays will vary with what the reader brings to the book
as opening assumptions, though any reader might agree that the final 40
pages of the book contain examples of some of the finest essay writing
of the last century. The categories of ambition, failure, boredom,
purity, bigamy, and secrecy will play in different accentuated movements
for each reader. Leading with ambition and failure was wise, as the
experiences are at least partially valid for any experienced or would-be
writer. The examples of obsessive ambition in writers like Balzac are
provided to bring us back to the theme of obsession at the book's end.
Most worthy in these initial pages, though, is the description of
examining a Titian painting from every possible angle, gaining new
insights by seeing the obvious while it's askew. The topsy-turvy
approach is applied liberally in the section on failure, examining
everything from rejection to incapacitation.

The section on
boredom will be invaluable for those whose wheels often spin in deep
mud, though I had specific reasons for not finding resonance. Upton is
not talking about writer's block here, as much as pointing to the places
and times (committee meetings) where experience is a looped rerun, an
infinite plain. In training for discovering the joy of small, almost
inconsequential experience, I stopped suffering boredom a few years ago.
In the process, I willed myself to almost an artificial autistic state
- accept all perceptual inputs with equal status, then apply bandpass
filters to keep from going crazy. Some of Upton's observations in the
boredom section can be applied to the filtering problem, but it required
some digging.

Upton makes clear in the purity section that the
notion of cleansing and purging rituals must be applied with extreme
care, and is not for everyone. Early on, she provides us with Pablo
Neruda's virtual rejection of purity in poetry (an opinion I largely
share). But the book provides a teasing suggestion that a ritual of
stripping away is worthwhile, not just for reaching a minimalist core,
but to let us know when we are filled with too much baggage.

The
last two sections climax the book's hidden power with the unexpected
directness of a suddenly-lopsided prize fight in its final rounds.
Upton uses the term "bigamy" to refer to the melding of genres and the
willingness to experiment outside familiar domains. Perhaps genre holds
some mysterious power in academia - I don't see it as mattering very
much in a world where improvisational musicians move into spoken-word
performance, and Latin American poets give us hundreds of pages of
police reports as the backbone for a new type of fiction. But even if
the notion of bigamy means little in loosely-defined worlds, the
observations in this section are astonishing.

Announcing up front
that you are concluding with a section on secrecy may spook the reader
into expecting a declaration that all writers should be enigmas to the
outside world. That is hardly what Upton is about. She is talking
about a strategy of disclosure in every work of prose or poetry, a
process that begins with the crafting of a world too puzzling and
personal to be relevant to a reader, and the means of carefully
revealing the secret core in a manner that can makes the most monotonous
of poems as much a cliffhanger as a detective novel. There are some
startling, occasionally terrifying, passages in these final pages -
poetry from Lawrence Joseph and Paul Celan, and an excerpt from a Don
DeLillo novel, used in a discussion of the possible meanings of the word
"embedded," that will chill many readers.

Upton's final page
comes upon us abruptly, but with such love and hope that any reader can
feel the book was a personal pep talk. Yet there are dimensions Upton
chose not to explore. While a critic should never suggest what type of
book should have been written if the author determines it to be outside a
domain, Upton herself talks about the "schizophrenia of publishers,"
but never addresses the virtual disappearance of the traditional
publishing industry. While most advisories within the book can apply to
an online world, traditional notions of editing and vetting are
vanishing at light speed, and it would have been nice to see an
exploration of what a book-and-audience world devoid of moorings might
look like. Oh well, that's another book. Upton has given us a
collection of a half-dozen essays as radically unique as Giorgio
Agamben's 'The End of the Poem." It seems difficult to imagine another
set of honed and distilled observations that could even cover similar
grounds, let alone do so as exquisitely as 'Swallowing the Sea' managed
to do.